The Piper's Son (14 page)

He follows her outside, his trembling arm around her shoulder.

“You okay?” he asks.

She nods, reaching up and kissing his cheek.

“Tom, your father’s back.”

There’s a look of disbelief on his face, and she can see he’s fighting hard to keep some control.

“Where?”

“He’s back at the house, I think.”

Tom’s shaking his head. “
Why?
Why isn’t he up north seeing Mum? What’s he doing here when he should be fixing things up with her?”

She puts a gentle hand to his mouth. “It’ll be fine. He’s been sober for more than half the year, Tom, and he’ll be determined —”

He cuts her off. “You didn’t live with him,” he hisses. “When she left and I was living with him, he was
determined
every day.”

She doesn’t want to fight Tom. He’s too fragile and she doesn’t know how it will manifest itself.

“For most of your life, he was a pretty fantastic father and husband, and I think it will be very sad if you remember him for what happened when Jacinta left. I’d hate to think any of us will be judged on a handful of years, Tom.”

He’s shaking his head. He doesn’t want to hear.

“I have to go,” she says, taking a deep breath because she doesn’t know how she’s going to prepare for Dominic. “I’ll see you at home tonight. You knock on my door when you come up to bed because I’ll be awake until you come home. Do you hear me?”

He pulls away and goes back inside without responding.

Her brother is waiting for her on the front step.

Dominic Finch Mackee.

School captain of Saint Sebastian’s, with his stocky swagger that beckoned the world to follow. “He’s the bloody pied piper,” Bill would complain when Georgie and Joe copied everything he did. Dom, who got his girlfriend pregnant, married her, and dropped out of an honors law degree so Jacinta could finish hers, and never once in twenty years dared express a regret over what could have been. Dom, who made a speech on the Sydney waterfront back in 1998 when the Patrick company sacked their entire workforce in the dead of night as a threat against unionism. Delivered it with his four-year-old daughter in a pram next to him and his thirteen-year-old son by his side. But he could also be Dominic the bastard. He was a drinker, Dom was. Always had been. Enough to make him the life of the party when things were good, and when it got bad, enough to make him a bad-tempered bastard for at least three quarters of the day. So if his son grunted an answer back to his mother in a typical adolescent way, it was a shove up against the wall with enough force to bruise him. Until Tom learned to shove back and ended up spending most of Year Eleven with Georgie and Joe.

He looks thin, not the thickset build he’s always had. And there’s such a hollowness in his eyes. And he’s looking older. They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke. Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.

He stands up and holds her for a while and she feels his body tremble.

“Come on,” she says quietly.

“Tommy?”

“He’s working at the Union. Won’t be home until ten. Let’s go in.”

Dominic shakes his head, seems like he needs fresh air.

She leaves the groceries on the porch and takes his hand. “Then let’s walk.”

They cross over to the park and she fights the shivers from this early August night. “I think he’s at breaking point,” she tells him, as though he’s asked. “He came to me four weeks ago with ten stitches in his head.”

Silence.

“Drugs. Bit of speed. Heaps of weed. Hanging out with a bunch of dickheads.”

She can’t see him in the dark, but she knows he’s gutted.

“He’s working, though,” she continues. “With Bob Spinelli’s kid and Stani’s niece. And that can’t be a bad thing.”

They sit on the swings for a while, not talking. In the park where they used to hang out on Sundays with Jacinta and Anabel and Lucia and Abe and their kids. Georgie was the picnic instigator. She’d have all the food and picnic gear under control so there’d be no backing out and no excuses about it being too much of a hassle. In summer they’d stay there until the sun came down. Tom and Dominic could kick a ball around for hours and not get bored. Even without Sam, it didn’t take much to make her happy. It had been the unspoken deal between her and Jacinta, years back when Dominic’s girl came into their lives. It’s where his other girlfriends had failed. Share her brothers and Georgie would be loyal for life. Jacinta got that, smart girl. Georgie missed her sister-in-law these days as much as Dominic. She longed for her niece, Anabel, with an anxiety that a phone call every second night couldn’t soothe.

They return to the house and Dominic grabs the groceries and follows her to dump the bags in the kitchen and then they settle his things in the front room that doubles as a study. When he sits on the futon, his eyes find hers and for once in their lives they have nothing to say to each other.

“I’ll make you something to eat,” she says quietly, walking out.

Later that night Georgie hears the front door open, and she comes out of her room and walks down the stairs to where they stand in the corridor staring at each other. Tom and Dominic. Same height. Same bog Irish looks courtesy of Tom Finch.
Say something, Dom,
she wants to shout.
You’ve always had something to say. Tell him you’re sorry you let him down but you’re human. Tell him you’ll work hard to make this right. You’re a union man, Dom. The person who can get dialogue going between two opposing sides.

But Dominic says nothing and Tom pushes past him and takes the stairs two at a time, as if to get as far away as possible.

When Tom gets to work on Monday morning, he notices that despite not getting his footy tips in on time, he’s kept his place in the top three. The only person he imagines getting them as accurate as him is Mohsin the Ignorer.

“Mate, did you fill out my footy-tipping sheet?” he asks when he sits down.

Mohsin ignores him and Tom wants to spit chips. When Mohsin the Ignorer finally looks at him, Tom can’t hold back.

“What’s your fucking problem?”

Mohsin has the audacity to look taken aback and Tom just bars him with his own look and goes back to work.

Like he does most afternoons at the Union before his shift, he stands at the door of the back room, watching Francesca and Justine negotiate their compilation. Each time, they acknowledge him with a nod before going back to the music. Once or twice he suggests a shift in key or a need for more force in a bend, but mostly he just watches as Justine plays her accordion and Francesca works with the lyrics and scribbles down the corrections.

Today Francesca looks up at him again, and he senses it’s an invitation to let him come in and listen.

“It’s going to be hillbilly,” Justine explains, as if he had asked. “Harmonica, accordion, and guitar. Bit like ‘Crazy Train,’” she adds, referring to a Waifs piece they used to do.

“We’ve called it ‘I Met You at the Cornerstone on the Highway to Bedlam,’” Francesca says.

He thinks about the title for a moment and nods, kind of liking it, really.

“Go on,” he says. “Read me the rest.”

“Only if you commit to playing on the compilation.”

Francesca has that arrogant air of being in charge. It still amazes him how they could have been misled by her personality in Year Eleven. It’s what depression does to a person; it changes them completely.

“You invited me in to listen,” he argues.

“It’s very confronting to have you listen to my lyrics,” she explains. “You’ll be critical and you’ll snicker. If you’re going to be a critical snickerer, I’d prefer that you pay with a bit of guitar playing.”

“And harmonica,” Justine says, trying the first line in another key. He always loved watching her fingers fly over the little black bass dots. Their best times on stage were when they dueled.

“I’m not good enough to do harmonica and guitar at the same time,” he says, still irritated that he’s at their mercy.

“Then work on it.”

Francesca flicks through her notepad and reads out some of the lyrics.

She glances toward the doorway and whispers
“soon”
to end the chorus in rhyme. It’s clear she doesn’t want Anti-rhyme Ned to hear.

“I think the chorus could be longer,” Tom suggests, “especially if it’s going to be hillbilly.”

“So we can tip the stars and hold the moon, / Graze the sun, but make it soon. / Come home, Jim, we’re waiting here,”
Justine suggests.

Tom and Francesca are nodding and thinking.

“With three cigarettes and a glass of beer!”
Ned taunts mockingly from the kitchen.

The three of them exchange looks. “He’s very annoying,” Tom says, taking the lyrics from Francesca. He didn’t realize the song was for Jimmy, but it makes sense really. Jimmy was all bedlam and hell at times. A curse to be around when you just wanted things to be calm. He never played by the rules, which made things too unpredictable most times. Both Jimmy and Tom had been forced to hang out with each other when they attached themselves to the female force. When he met Tara and these girls, he didn’t explain the shit of what was happening at home with his father’s drinking and why he spent so much time with Georgie and Joe. He just sat behind them on the bus home in the afternoon and took advantage of the therapy they dished out to Frankie, whose own home life was falling to pieces. Until being with them made more sense than being with his other mates. It kept him sane, really. It wasn’t until Jimmy Hailler called him on it, not until the crazy bastard had started sitting with him in woodwork classes, that he actually started talking. Jimmy Hailler was a killer of a listener. The guy understood fragmented people.

“Suggestions?”

Francesca and Justine are standing in front of him. Their lyrics are in his hands, and he doesn’t realize until Francesca reaches out to steady the paper, her dark eyes piercing into him, that his hands are shaking.

He thinks for a moment
. “
Yeah,” he says, but his throat feels croaky, so he clears it
.

He shrugs. He doesn’t know where to go from there without sounding sentimental.

Justine puts the accordion down.
“
It’s five,” she says, looking up at the time.

She walks out and Tom waits as Francesca packs up.

“Where is he?”

“Who?” she asks, looking up.

“Jimmy?”

“Jim,” she corrects. She shrugs. “Who knows with Jim?”

“What happened?”

“He just nicked off after his granddad died last year.”

“His granddad’s dead?” Tom is stunned. Jimmy had lived with the old man for years. As far as they were concerned, there was no one else around.

“When?”

She’s confused by the question. “November last year.”

“So where did he go?”

She shrugs. “Away. Out bush. You know Jim. He was never going to stick around.”

“Why did you let him go?” Tom can feel himself getting angrier and angrier, but he can’t control it, especially when he sees her expression contains fury beyond anything.

“Jim couldn’t cope,” Francesca snaps. “Jim went out bush. We don’t know where he is. Once in a very blue moon we get an entry on Siobhan’s MySpace page. He once sent her a message asking if he could borrow a hundred dollars. She deposited it into his account. Another time he sent my mother flowers for her birthday. What do you want me to say, Thomas? Jim doesn’t want to be found just yet. We had the funeral and then he was gone.”

“Did anyone turn up?” he asks. “His mother or father?”

She shakes her head. “Just us and our families, and some of the old guys his grandfather knew, Ms. Quinn and Brother Louis and even Mr. Brolin from school.”

Everyone but him. He kicks the chair across the room and the music goes flying.

“Whose decision was it not to tell me?”

She shakes her head, grabs her stuff, and walks out of the room, pushing past Justine, who stares at Tom from the door, stunned.

“People can hear, Thomas.”

There’s something in her eyes that makes him feel like he’s sickened them, like that time when they saw him lose it years ago after a night in a pub on Broadway, when some guy had tried to pick a fight. Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better — courtesy of his father and Joe, who could go off at any given moment. Joe said it was a Bill thing. Nothing about nature there. With the Mackees, it was all nurture.